HowTo Upgrade Gnome 2 in Tumbleweed to Gnome 3

(Edit 14 may: warning: this method will be obsolete as soon as the Gnome 3 RPMs are merged into the main Tumbleweed repo, so you should check whether that’s happened).

There is a Tumbleweed repo containing Gnome 3 RPMs, located at this address:

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed:/GNOME/openSUSE_Tumbleweed

The package manager (@gregkh of these forums) intends soon to fold all the RPMs into the Tumbleweed repo so that a special repo for Gnome packages will no longer be required. But until this happens, that is the repo that you can attach if you want to upgrade your Tumbleweed with Gnome 2 to Tumbleweed with Gnome 3.

Here’s the process I used, written as a HowTo:

First, before you attach the Gnome 3 repo, prepare your Tumbleweed for Gnome 3 by making it fully up to date in two steps. Step one is to get the existing security fixes and so on for the underlying 11.4 up to scratch by running Yast Online Update (go to Yast → Software → Online Updates). Step two is to upgrade the RPMs from the Tumbleweed repo with this command

zypper dup --from Tumbleweed

After making Tumbleweed up to date, attach and enable the Tumbleweed:Gnome repo (see address above). You can use Yast → Software → Software Reops to add it. I named the repo TumbleweedGnome (for example). So now you should have the original 11.4 repo enabled along with your primary Tumbleweed repos and the new Gnome repo, like this:

john@tumbleweed114:~> zypper lr -u
#  | Alias                | Name                   | Enabled | Refresh | URI                                                                                                
---+----------------------+------------------------+---------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 1 | Tumbleweed           | Tumbleweed             | Yes     | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed/standard/
 2 | TumbleweedPackman    | TumbleweedPackman      | Yes     | Yes     | http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed
 3 | repo-non-oss         | openSUSE-11.4-Non-Oss  | Yes     | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/non-oss/
 4 | repo-oss             | openSUSE-11.4-Oss      | Yes     | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/
 5 | TumbleweedGnome      | TumbleweedGnome        | Yes     | Yes     | http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed:/GNOME/openSUSE_Tumbleweed

Then you simply run the update command with focus on the new Gnome repo,:

zypper dup --from TumbleweedGnome

When I ran the “zypper dup --from TumbleweedGnome” I got one dependency issue (not an error – an issue that was easy to solve). You might not get the issue, depending on what you had installed beforehand. Here’s the message I got:

Problem: libgdata7-0.6.6-2.1.i586 requires libgdata-lang = 0.6.6, but this requirement cannot be provided

and here’s the resolution suggested by zypper

 Solution 22: install libgdata-lang-0.6.6-2.1.noarch from excluded repository

I accepted this and all proceeded smoothly. When the process finishes, the final step is to install three extra packages, shown below:

zypper in gnome-shell metatheme-adwaita-common gnome-shell-lang

Then reboot and it’s done.

Caveat: as at todays date 3rd May, this is a quote from Greg k-h

It will be a few weeks for GNOME 3 to work in Tumbleweed in a stable way, please be patient.

So even though it works nicely for me, your mileage may vary.